Montana Headwall

MONTANA HEADWALL Volume 4.1 SPRING 2012

SPRING 2012

Complimentary

mtheadwall.com

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photo by Chad Harder

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How can a quadriplegic go hunting and fishing?

Let this man show you how.

CONTENTS

BETWEEN THE ROCKS AND A WET PLACE Why kayakers are up a creek with a paddle

HEAVEN AND HIGH WATER A triumphant dad-and-son fishing trip

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16 28 40

THE UNSTOPPABLE CHRIS CLASBY

INSIDE On Belay

Grub 38

6

Bruin your appetite

Contributors

8 Head Trip 44

Head Lines 11

Spray skirts and PBRs

Tenkara fishing is un-reel A skier risks prison for powder Can you trust that chairlift?

Head Out 48 Your spring recreation calendar

Head Light Head Gear 50

Shooting stars 22

MyTopo maps lead the way

Head Shots Our readers’ best 24

The Crux 58 Wild Things 36

A bear encounter to die for

Beetle mania

STAFF

317 S. Orange St.• Missoula, MT 59801 406-543-6609 • Fax 406-543-4367 www.montanaheadwall.com

Please recycle this magazine

EDITOR Amy Linn GENERAL MANAGER Lynne Foland PHOTO EDITOR Chad Harder ADVERTISING SALES MANAGER Carolyn Bartlett PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Joe Weston CIRCULATION MANAGER Adrian Vatoussis SPECIAL PROJECTS COORDINATOR Chris Melton CONTRIBUTORS John S. Adams, Jack Ballard, Rick Bass, Chris Dombrowski, Emily Downing, Caroline Kurtz, Ari LeVaux, Jason McMackin, Ryan Newhouse, Jamie Rogers, Yogesh Simpson, Brad Tyer COPY EDITOR ART DIRECTOR PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVES CONTRIBUTING EDITOR EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

David Merrill Kou Moua Jenn Stewart, Jonathan Marquis Tami Johnson, Steven Kirst, Alecia Goff, Sasha Perrin, Lorie Rustvold Aaron Teasdale Matt Gibson

Montana Headwall (ISSN 2151-1799) is a registered trademark of Independent Publishing, Inc. Copyright 2012 by Independent Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.

Reprinting in whole or in part is forbidden except by permission of Independent Publishing, Inc. Views expressed herein are those of the author exclusively.

And yeah, we’re having fun.

Cover: Cheyenne Aura Rogers kayaks Bear Creek.

Photo by Chad Harder

Chad Harder

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T

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ON BELAY

o be perfectly honest with you, I wasn’t 100 percent thrilled about Headwall contributor Jamie Rogers’ plan to write about quadriplegic hunter and fisherman Chris Clasby. I want Headwall to inspire people to get outside and have more fun. Stories about paralyzed accident victims would seem to lack the requisite measure of rousing encouragement.

But I’m very glad I said yes. Reading about Clasby can change your mind about things—really important things, like the value of a single day on the river with the sun shining on your face, and the triviality of the obstacles that keep you away.

I’m most impressed with Clasby's unwavering insistence that he’s enjoyed good fortune. His defiantly positive outlook demands a radical reassessment of what life really has to offer, what matters, and what we can accept as part of the deal. Think about that the next time you’re suffering with a blister on a long hike, or freezing your ass off in a September storm. Frustration, Clasby shows us, has nothing to do with our circumstances and everything to do with our attitudes. We have the power to overcome. That’s more than enough inspiration to lift me off my butt, just to explore the possibilities for tomorrow. Thanks, Chris. And thanks to Jamie, too.

Elsewhere in this issue, Chris Dombrowski finds an allied inspiration on the first camping trip with his six-year-old son.

When the world offers itself for a child’s enthusiastic discovery, it’s hard not to celebrate the occasion. Celebrating likewise turns out to be the order of the day at the Bigfork Whitewater Festival, a weekend of heavy water and heavy drinking, as described by the irrepressible Yogesh Simpson. And Brad Tyer takes us into the world of steep creekers, intrepid paddlers who bide their time all spring for the one perfect day when they can attempt otherwise impossible lines.

Of course, Chris Clasby might suggest that really, they’re all perfect days, and life gives us all the ability we need to appreciate them.

Matt Gibson Editor-in-Chief

Chad Harder

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CONTRIBUTORS

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The author of 30 books, Bass’ most recent works are The Heart Beneath the Heart, a book about writing, and a nonfiction work with McSweeney’s Books, In My Home There is No More Sorrow: Ten Days in Rwanda.

Bass is a board member of the Yaak Valley Forest Council (www.yaak valley.org) and divides his time between his home there and in Missoula.

In between volunteering in public schools to help students develop writing skills and trying to give her German shepherd, Jack, enough exercise, Kurtz likes to write about nature, especially the creepy crawly things. She currently is compiling a collection of essays drawn from 20 years of coordinating “Field Notes” on Montana Public Radio, a program produced by the Montana Natural History Center.

Jamie Rogers

If you’re 17, slogging through senior year at a stuffy New Hampshire boarding school, and you’re convinced the only things you could ever do for a “job” involve fly fishing and writing, then finding Missoula is like discovering the God particle.

So says Rogers, who moved to Missoula and enrolled at the University of Montana in 2005. He now works as a fly fishing guide and moonlights as a hotdog vendor. He lives with a disgruntled roommate and his dog, Poppy.

Rick Bass

Montana Headwall Page 8 Spring 2012

Caroline Kurtz

B r a d Ty e r

Former Missoula Independent editor Brad Tyer wouldn’t strap his ass into a creek boat and toss himself down a mountain if he had a .44 to his temple, but he has boundless admiration for people who do. His first book, Opportunity, Montana, will be published by Beacon Press in spring 2013.

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State-of-the-art facility including on-site outpatient surgery, open extremity MRI, Direct Digital X-ray, Orthopedic Urgent Care, and In-House Physical Therapy.

Serving Western Montana for Over 50 Years with Comprehensive Orthopedic Care

(406) 721-4436 w w w. m i s s o u l a b o n e a n d j o i n t . c o m

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TROUT LITE

Shed pounds with reel-free tenkara fly rods More than 100 people showed up for the on-stream demo and presentations, including one by Jordan and others by tenkara converts like Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard and his friend Craig Matthews, owner of Blue Ribbon Flies in West Yellowstone. The keynote speech came from famed tenkara master Hisao Ishigaki (who is also slated to speak at the 2012 summit, July 28-29, in Salt Lake City).

It’s easy on the wallet, too. A full kit can cost less than $200, the price for a quality fly reel alone.

The traditional Japanese method, well suited for the mountains, is gaining momentum worldwide and catching on quickly in Montana, particularly among the backcountry crowd.

“Tenkara allows you to dramatically reduce the weight and cost of what you bring with you in the backcountry,” says Ryan Jordan, a licensed fishing guide and founder of the Bozeman-based BackpackingLight.com. And it snags fish in alpine lakes and mountain streams alike, he adds.

Jordan was one of the first guides in the country to focus on teaching the fixed-line method and to use it for guided trips, particularly for pack rafting and backpacking. He’s not alone these days: Tenkara (“in heaven,” in Japanese) even has an annual summit, the first one held in August 2011 in West Yellowstone.

Practice is key, Ishigaki told the crowd. “You can buy the gear at shops, but you can’t buy skill,” he said. We Japanese like that about tenkara fishing.”

Mountain villagers in Japan perfected tenkara 1,000 years ago, historians believe. Commercial fishermen wearing clothing waterproofed with persimmon resin used it to feed their families and earn a living catching trout (iwana).

Modern tenkara mimics the ancient form, albeit with a graphite rod instead of bamboo. All you get is a short braided line tied to the rod tip with a few feet of tippet and a fly (kebari) attached.

You lift the rod enough to raise the fly from the water, whip it behind you once, and snap it forward. Once the fly hits the water, you use conventional jerks or tugs to move it across the current.

Tenkara’s chief usefulness is in swiftmoving streams inhabited by trout that

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The tenkara fad in America is traced back to 2009, when Hisao Ishigaki demonstrated it at the Catskills Fly Fishing Center and Museum in New York.

can’t afford to let anything remotely food-sized pass them by. It’s also handy in winter, since your line won’t freeze to the guides (there are none).

Another plus: Instead of toting enough flies, nymphs and streamers to fill a mini-fridge, tenkara mostly relies on one style of fly—a soft-hackle pattern with a dark body that doesn’t imitate any one bug.

Chouinard says he’s exclusively used tenkara rods for the past two years.

Matthews, who partnered with Chouinard to launch 1% for the Planet— businesses that contribute 1 percent of sales to environmental groups—says he now uses his tenkara rod more than his others.

“Tenkara fishing forces you to get close to rising fish,” Matthews explains.

“I tell people to get close enough to see the fish’s eyes.”

Most fly fishers, not surprisingly, aren’t eager to give up their cherished collection of rods, reels and thousands of perfectly matched and tied flies.

“But what happens is, before long, people start seeking out the places they can use their tenkara rods more than their regular rods,” as Chris Stewart, a Salt Lake City-based fishing guide, told the summit. “It changes their behavior.”

Ryan Newhouse

HEAD LINES

Credit a thousand-year-old Japanese tradition for the latest fad in fly fishing.

The new piscatorial passion is tenkara, a reel-free form of fly fishing with ultra-light, ultra-simple gear that weighs as little as 8 ounces and takes up a third of the space of a conventional setup.

A telescoping graphite tenkara rod transforms from a 20-inch stick into a 14foot action piece as light as your wallet.

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STEEP PRICE TO PAY

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HEAD LINES

Jail time for skiing? Now that’s hardcore.

Ryan Hill risked his freedom for a single day on the slopes, and now he’s in the pokey.

Thanks to some poor decisionmaking and what he called “baby mama drama,” Hill will have to wait until next season before getting another chance to shred the gnar.

“I was thinking the big jumps in the park were going to be built,” Hill said from the dayroom at the Sanction, Treatment, Assessment, Revocation, and Transition (START) Center in Butte, a holding place for convicts before the hard time starts.

“I knew it wasn’t going to be a powder day, but I wanted to hit those jumps.”

The 32-year-old Helena native was arrested at the Great Divide ski area on Dec. 10 after violating the terms of his pre-

release from Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge. Hill, convicted of burglary in 2004, was recently paroled and was only allowed to leave the pre-release center to go to work or the gym. He thought he had a perfect plan to skip out of work and snag a few runs though the park.

But he hit a bump he wasn’t expecting. His ex, the mother of his child, also happened to be

in and out of two different Montana prisons. He’s been in pre-release three times, and he’s had two rounds of drug and alcohol treatment. Hill said his desires to do the things many Montanans love to do—like skiing— have landed him back behind bars more times than he’d like to count.

“I love Montana so much. That’s why I try to get away with shit I guess I

Ryan Hill‘s ex saw him at the ski hill and had him busted for violating the terms of his probation. at the mountain that day, and she called the police.

Hill was escorted off the sun deck in handcuffs.

“Every time she hears of me screwing up she gets me,” Hill said.

Hell hath no fury, indeed.

This isn’t the first time Hill has returned to prison for breaking the terms of his release. Over the years he’s been

Montana Headwall Page 12 Spring 2012

shouldn’t try to get away with,” Hill said.

Last winter, while out on parole, Hill left the state on multiple occasions to hunt powder in Idaho and Wyoming in violation of the terms of his release.

“He skipped out on parole to go two states away just to get the fresh,” says Hill’s friend, Jesse (who didn’t want to give his last name). “He’s a diehard skier.”

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TING 90 Y RA

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CELEB

On the Idaho-Wyoming trip, while driving over Teton Pass west of Jackson, Wyo., Hill rolled his Jeep. He convinced his friend to take the blame for driving so he wouldn’t get busted.

“We got pretty lucky,” Hill said.

“Jesse said he was driving. We didn’t have beers but we had a little weed in the vehicle. They didn’t search the vehicle and he said he was driving so they didn’t check me out. He best-buddied for me.”

Hill said his friends warned him that his pow addiction was eventually going to cost him. But Hill thought it was a risk worth taking.

“They always tried to tell me, ‘you must love prison,’” he said. “It’s just my M.O. I’ll make it six months or a year and then something else catches up with me.”

Hill said he expects to be out of prison by August. “Hopefully I’ll be out of here in time for wakeboarding season,” he said.

John S. Adams

LTH A E H R U O Y ENJOY

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WHAT GOES UP

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HEAD LINES

Montana lifts send skiers and chairs flying As skiers boot up and strap in for a day of powder, a chairlift accident is usually the last thing on their minds.

Sure, the lift will occasionally stop for a while. But most skiers trust they won’t plummet to the ground—and that the chairs won’t either.

That faith wasn’t completely warranted in the 2011-2012 season, when Montana ski areas were plagued by an unusual series of chairlift accidents. On Dec. 27, a chair detached from the cable of the LaVelle lift at Montana Snowbowl after it hit a lift operator in the loading zone; he was not seriously hurt.

Less than 24 hours later, a burst of wind at Red Lodge Mountain Resort caused a chair to drop off the cable of the Willow Creek lift. The chair and its riders—two 17-year-old snowboarders—

fell 30 feet to the ground. The teens were treated for injuries at a local clinic and released that night.

Then, on February 11, an instructor and three kids fell off the Ramcharger lift at Big Sky Resort after one or more of the children failed to load properly.

None were injured, thanks to falls cushioned by fresh powder.

The incidents led the three ski areas to assess their equipment and procedures. The conclusion in each case: The

Jeff Schmidt, the general manager at Red Lodge, said the incidents are so uncommon, nothing much can be done to prevent them. One chair out of 114 on the lift happened to be in a bad place when the wind came up, he said. An engineer inspected the lift and cleared it for reopening.

Chairlift accidents are rare in general, industry officials say. The injuries to the teens at Red Lodge were the first of their kind in Montana since the National

Vermont and other Eastern states require chairlifts to have safety bars, but Western states have not followed suit. equipment was not to blame. Rather, the culprits were user error or a freak confluence of events.

Ski Areas Association (NSAA) started keeping track in 1973.

Dave Byrd, NSAA’s risk manager, said chairlifts in the country have transported skiers 7 billion miles since 1978.

“Our safety record is extraordinary,” he said.

Most accidents involve inexperienced skiers, children who are too short to load without help, or people who have medical problems (the case for a 19-year-old woman who fell to her death Jan. 29 after suffering a seizure on a lift at Canyons Ski Resort in Utah). A 7-yearold boy and 19-year-old man also died in falls this season.

Human error causes about 90 percent of lift accidents. “If you drop a glove, drop a ski pole, when you’re loading or unloading, it’s more likely to happen,” Byrd says.

If anything, the recent troubles should make people pay a little more attention to how they ride lifts, beginners especially, said Chad Jones, the public relations manager for Big Sky. “At any given time, you’re several feet off the ground and you need to act like it.”

Emily Downing

Eric Samsoe

CORRECTION Due to an editor’s regrettably weak math skills, the Winter 2011 issue of Headwall reported the wrong number of miles of groomed ski trails at the Izaak Walton Inn. There are more than 20.

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The Tracker Pine beetles by the numbers

5

In millimeters, size of a mountain pine beetle

5 million

Acres of trees in Montana killed by pine beetles between 2000 and 2010

11

Seconds it can take for red (dead) needles on a lodgepole pine to catch on fire

41

Seconds it takes for green needles to ignite

2

Weeks it can take for beetles to start killing a tree

4

Major pine species under attack, including lodgepole, ponderosa, whitebark and limber (but all pines are at risk)

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Michael Schweizer

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t the Kelly Island fishing access on a warm September morning, Chris Clasby guides his wheelchair onto a raft. To move forward he puffs hard into a plastic tube; to move backward he sips hard. Right is a soft puff, left a soft sip.

The boat ramp is pocked with rocks and ruts and the chair lurches a zigzag toward the boat. At one point, Clasby nears the edge of the concrete ramp and a 4-foot drop to the river. He senses onlookers tensing as his chair stops a few feet short of the edge. “You know, I probably weigh 300 pounds with this chair,” he says to me, smiling mischievously. “If I fall in, I’m not coming out.”

Unassisted, Clasby corrects his course and maneuvers himself up a collapsible ramp and onto the boat, a 16foot Cataraft with a thick-plated metal floor. The customized craft is owned by the Missoula-based Montana Access to Outdoor Recreation program (MATOR), the only one of its kind in the state and one of two or so in the country. Since its inception in 2008, MATOR has loaned adaptive watercraft, off-road wheel-

chairs, fishing rods, customized bows, and rifle mounts—along with roughly 400 pieces of other gear, ranging from battery chargers to hand-cranked cycles—to disabled outdoorsmen and women across Montana. Equipment like this can be prohibitively expensive (a rifle mount alone goes for over $1,500), but these loaners come free of charge.

MATOR also provides free demonstrations and connects clients with a network of volunteers to accompany them on outings.

Clasby, 39, has been the program coordinator since the beginning. He has talkative blue eyes, a ready smile, and, since 1990, has been paralyzed from the neck down.

At work, he operates his computer and phone with voice recognition software. He manipulates the computer mouse with a 14-inch “mouth-stick” between his lips. Working from MATOR’s Southwest Higgins office, Clasby facilitates the equipment loans, organizes a yearly fishing conclave, and researches new assistive equipment. The greatest perk, he admits, is testing the gear.

Chris Clasby

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“Well, we need to make sure the stuff works,” he says.

Once Clasby is on board, his wheelchair locked in place, Matt Miller, a MATOR volunteer and former fishing guide, mounts a sip-and-puff fishing rod onto a metal crossbar at the front of the raft.

When Clasby sips on the tube, a mechanical arm draws the rod back until it’s parallel with the water, loading a system of springs. Stop sipping, and the springs release, catapulting the rod forward and launching a cast. To reel in, Clasby puffs.

Despite the technology, Clasby, also an avid hunter, says outdoor recreation is still a significant challenge for people with a disability. Most activities need to be accessible from a road, and equipment meltdowns are not uncommon. But what many would see as limitations, Clasby sees as sport. “We have this joke: When we hear a guy brag about his big bull or big fish, we just listen until he’s finished and then say, ‘Yeah, but did you do it with your lips?’”

I

n 1988, when Clasby was a sophomore at Helena High School, he got a job bagging groceries. He’d come to Helena to live with his dad, leaving his mom and five siblings behind in Missoula in search of a new degree of independence.

One day while working at the grocery store, Clasby asked a customer if he needed help carrying his bags. The man’s name was Hank Emerson and the two chatted as they walked across the parking lot. It was fall, and the conversation inevitably turned to hunting. “I remember Hank said, ‘I’m not some kind of weirdo, but if you want to go duck hunting sometime, here’s my card,’” Clasby recalled.

For the next two years, Emerson and Clasby hunted and fished around Helena.

Emerson was in his mid-60s, a retired lieutenant general and Vietnam veteran.

Clasby was a typical 16-year-old Montanan, interested in calf roping, cattle wrestling, truck driving and girls. Though hunting and fishing had always been a part of Clasby’s life, he credits Emerson for distilling a passive interest into a passion.

On July 9, 1990, a few weeks after his high school graduation, Clasby and a friend were driving north on I-15 out of Butte, headed back to Helena, after competing in the Silver State International Rodeo, a teenagers’ competition in Fallon, Nevada. They took it slow on the Top to bottom: Clasby on the water; changing up the rig; a guide's job well done.

Michael Schweizer

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last leg, visiting friends in Missoula, Drummond, and Philipsburg, and stopping to buy another case of beer in Anaconda. Clasby has no memory of this part of the trip, but over the years he’s been able to piece together most of what happened.

At around 7 p.m., the teens were driving through Elk Park, 60 miles from home. Police reports say the driver swerved, over-corrected, and crashed into the median, pitching the Ranger pickup end-over-end. Both boys were ejected through the back window of the cab.

Accident investigators could not determine who was at the wheel. Clasby has long since given up finding the answer.

An ambulance brought him to St. James Hospital in Butte. His condition stabilized within a few days, but he remained unconscious for nearly eight weeks. The wreck had fractured his right elbow and collarbone and snapped his spinal cord at the C4 vertebra in his neck, leaving his arms and legs paralyzed. After five weeks in Butte, he was transferred, still unconscious, to Craig Hospital in Colorado, a specialized rehab center.

Clasby woke up in sunshine, tilted back in a chair, staring up at unfamiliar brick buildings. His dad was standing over him. They were in Englewood, Colo., in a courtyard behind Craig Hospital, his dad told him. Clasby and his friend had been in an accident on their way back from the rodeo on July 9.

Clasby thought it strange that his dad used a specific date like that—“July 9.”

“What day is today?” he asked.

“September 2,” his father said.

His dad went on to explain that his friend died shortly after the accident.

That’s when Clasby realized he couldn’t move his body.

Over the next four months, Clasby had to re-learn everything. He could no longer dress himself, and brushing his teeth or turning on the television, once acts requiring no thought, were now major obstacles, demanding the help of others. “I went from driving trucks and hunting to not being able to feed myself,” he says.

Despite all that, Clasby considered himself lucky to be alive and able to do things other patients at Craig could not.

“My roommate had broken his neck ...

He could move his eyes and eyebrows— period. And a lot of people were on ventilators. I could breathe on my own.”

After his discharge in December 1990 Clasby returned to Helena to live in the house his father still owned. “There was almost a fear about leaving the hospital,” he says. “I was a little afraid about how people would react. But my friends and family, and people who I hadn’t even considered friends, were just so good to me.”

His best friend from high school, and the friend’s girlfriend, moved in with Clasby. The support was there, sometimes even when he didn’t know it.

Hank Emerson is now in his 80s, and lives in Arizona, unable to talk very often, Clasby says. But years ago, when Clasby woke up in Craig Hospital, he found a Saint Michael medallion bracelet on his wrist. Emerson brought it to him while he was still unconscious at the hospital in Butte. Saint Michael is considered a patron saint of paratroopers, and Emerson wore the charm in Vietnam, where he was shot down three times and survived.

Michael Schweizer

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On May 30, 1991, Clasby’s 19th birthday, he received a letter from Emerson. It promised they would continue to create hunting memories. It said his present was on the way. A few weeks later, Clasby got a package. It was the first adaptive rifle mount he had ever seen.

On a hunt outside of Helena with his friend Dan Picchietti, he took a 6-by-6 branch-antler bull, using the mount from Emerson. Picchietti had carried Clasby out of the horse trailer they’d spent the night in, wiped the ice off of Clasby’s wheelchair, and guided him through brambles to a spot overlooking a clearing. It wasn’t long before a small herd appeared, two bulls included. Clasby took aim, fired, and connected. When he recalls it, he doesn’t mention that his

The Rural Institute, among many things, is home to the Center for Excellence in Disability Education, Research, and Service, part of a network of centers that serve people nationwide. By 2008, thanks to a federal grant, Clasby’s job got even better: MonTech launched MATOR, dedicated to outdoor recreation.

Before MATOR, “I wondered if there n the fall of 1991, some 14 months would ever be more than just sitting after the crash, Clasby enrolled at Carroll College. By that time, Mary around in a wheelchair,” one particiWatne, his former high pant, Mark Cash, told me. school girlfriend, had Cash, now 43, fell off a come back into his life; a North Dakota oil rig in year later they decided to 2002 and fractured the When we hear a guy about his move to Missoula together, vertebrae near the base of where Clasby continued his neck. The accident left big bull or , we say, working toward an him paralyzed from the English degree at the waist down, with only lim, but did you do it with University of Montana. ited mobility in his arms.

Clasby describes the Three years ago, Cash joined one of MATOR’s subsequent years as so summer fishing trips, a now-annual seamless, it’s easy to forget the chalhunter’s orange was draped over the event that draws Montanans from lenges he must have faced. He graduated back of his wheelchair. Or that he pulled around the state for three days on the in 1996 and moved with Watne to the trigger with his lips.

Kamiah, Idaho, where he’d gotten a job Clark Fork and Lower Bitterroot rivers.

Clasby also hunted for jobs. At one teaching high school English and history.

MATOR provides the rods and reels. point he worked as an employment Volunteers take turns rowing the cusspecialist; at another point he had to The couple returned to Missoula a year tomized rafts. quit working due to health reasons later and Clasby enrolled in UM’s School The venture has grown considerably, of Social Work, earning a master’s degree (he’d developed a rare toxic reaction to a medication). But in 2006, his health from 21 anglers in 2009 to 110 people in 2000. restored, Clasby won a position at two years later. During his last trip, Cash In between studying he’d been able MonTech, a program at UM’s Rural landed an 18.5-inch rainbow trout. to fish and hunt on occasion, but once Institute that provides assistive technolthe undergraduate work was over, he ogy for Montana’s disabled population. could focus on it again—wholeheartedly.

Continued on page 54

I

‘Yeah

brag big fish your lips?’

Montana Headwall Page 21 Spring 2012

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Shooting stars

I

by Chad Harder

HEAD LIGHT

With night photos, the sky’s the limit n the last issue of Headwall, Joe Irons photographed the Equinox Challenge, a 24-hour race that draws crosscountry skiers from across the country.

While Irons took many compelling shots, one image really stood out—a long exposure of a headlamped racer cruising past the camera in the middle of the night, a ribbon of light snaking behind him.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be an expert to capture light trails, the moon, stars, comets, and other captivations in the night sky.

First, forget the flash. Flashes adequately illuminate subjects close to the lens, but they’re simply too small and underpowered to light nighttime backgrounds or large scenes.

Get around this limitation by overriding some of your camera’s automatic settings. Most cameras (both digital and film) have an ISO adjustment, a setting that controls the amount of light you need to

record a good exposure. The higher the ISO, the less light required.

As a rule of thumb, set the ISO to 100 or 200 in bright daylight, and jack the settings higher—often to 1600—for flash-less night shooting.

Using a higher ISO gives you a grainier, less detailed image, so experiment with your camera’s ISO setting while keeping an eye on your viewfinder to see what best suits the situation. Next, adjust the mode to “Manual” Joe Irons and spin the shutter dial to its longest setting—most cameras today go to 15 or 30 seconds. Then shoot a test frame to see how well the camera captures the scene.

If you have a tripod on hand, use it; if you don’t, set the camera on a solid perch. Compose your frame, and use the camera’s built-in timer (or a remote shutter release) to prevent any shake when you hit the shutter.

Shoot lots of frames. Things like composition, exposure and focus are all difficult to execute at night, so even after you think you have the shot you want, shoot more and sort through them later.

For the image on this page, I used a timer and a tripod. The shutter was open for 20 seconds, just long enough to record a bit of star blur, a result of the Earth spinning. (To get the full effect of stars spinning, you’ll need a remote release to keep the shutter open for hours.) In this case, a bright moon bathed the scene, but you can also use a headlamp to “paint” the landscape from behind the camera. Soon you’ll stop putting your camera away at bedtime.

And you’ll wake up some new talents.

Chad Harder

We know you’re out there, having epics and snapping photos. Instead of cursing them with an anonymous death in hard-drive purgatory, go for the glory and send your best

images to us at hweditor@mtheadwall.com. Include the location, your name, the names of all people shown and any information you think is useful. We’ll take it from there.

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Montana Headwall Page 23 Spring 2012

Jaren Williams

Speed flyer Jaren Williams (foreground) takes the fast way down from 9,351-foot Saint Mary Peak on a smoky day in the Bitterroot Mountains last summer.

www.mtheadwall.com

HEAD SHOTS

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Uschi Carpenter

The Missoula-based Montana Dirt Girls strike a pose along the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area’s “Fenceline Trail."

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Paul Queneau

Fresh off the Blackfoot River leg of the 12-hour GrizzlyMan Adventure Race, racers Heidi Kent and Kelly Hines take a compass reading and transition to the next stage.

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HEAD SHOTS

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Matt Sylvester logs into Bear Creek.

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I

t’s a 70-degree bluebird day, midweek in early June 2011, and 26year-old Todd Richey and 27-yearold Matt Sylvester are riding the Red Rocket—a neoprene-stinky Subaru with 180,000 miles on the odometer— toward the Bitterroot’s Bear Creek, looking for wood.

Wood is bad. Wood blocks creeks, and Todd and Matt kayak creeks. Todd once turned a creek’s corner to find a downed trunk spanning his path like a splintery clothesline. He couldn’t go over it and he couldn’t go around it, so he popped his spray skirt on the approach and caught the log in his arms and pulled himself up onto it as the creek sucked his boat off his legs and under the log and gone. Todd paddles with a folding saw tucked under his PFD, just in case he or anyone else gets in wood trouble.

Take a moment to consider that.

There will be no wood trouble today, though. They’re just scouting.

Todd and Matt organize Best of the

Quinton Barnett finds the line.

Bitterroot, an annual two-day steep creek race on Kootenai Creek, near Stevensville, and Bear Creek, near Victor.

They’re scouting in preparation for what will be the event’s third year, if the weather will cooperate.

Steep creeking is a specialized echelon of kayaking in which primarily young people with large reserves of nerve strap their lower halves into blunt plastic shells and toss themselves down the wet parts of mountains with paddles in their hands. It is rightly considered an extreme sport. It is also, especially in Montana, an extremely temperamental sport, offering an almost vanishingly small window of viable conditions.

A creek that’s flowing too low turns creeking into a game of pinball. The kayaker is the ball, and the bumpers are rocks. A creek that’s flowing too high is basically a fire hose coming down a mountain. Though you will find no shortage of fire hose riders on YouTube, and in

American Whitewater’s accident database, that’s no condition for a race designed to introduce new creekers to the sport in a safe and supported environment.

Cultivating new creekers is almost as important to the sport as snowpack and scouting wood. Friends don’t let friends creek solo. You’re gonna want a crew.

Unpenned from the car, Matt bounds up the Bear Creek trail hopping on and off rocks just because they’re there, until he finds the spot: a shady approach to the lower creek with a stone just a few feet off the bank. Matt knows the stone.

It’s his gauge. There are no flow gauges on the Bitterroot’s creeks to tell you how high they’re running. You can read the differential between the USGS gauges on the Bitterroot River at Darby, upstream, and Victor, below the creek, and extrapolate how much flow the interstitial creeks are adding, but to know for sure, you have to go look. From experience, Matt knows just where the optimum flow hits his rock. Today, in early June, with the

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race scheduled for any day now, it’s still running too high.

“Three inches,” Todd says, “makes all the difference in the world.”

Today’s level, Matt says, is “butt pucker.”

Matt’s been checking this rock since the tail end of April 2011, which was, paradoxically, a crummy year for creeking in Montana. The ideal scenario is a heavy snowpack released gently and consistently through a cool spring and, with a little luck, into early summer. In 2011, a heavy snowpack hung on into spring and then cut loose in a blast of warm weather and rain, flooding the Clark Fork, Blackfoot and Bitterroot.

Once the surge had purged, the creeks turned back into pinball machines in a matter of days. For steep creekers, it was a year of water, water everywhere, and entirely too much to run.

Todd and Matt will try again, and again, making the drive and scouting for wood and checking how much of their rock is wet until the creek drops to a level they consider safe. When it’s right they’ll send out the word via Facebook and cell phone, and with a few days’ notice the race will be on.

T

he sport of creeking, a subset of whitewater kayaking, combines the downstream-travel aspects of river running (moving from Point A to Point B, with all the logistical difficulties that implies) with the technical maneuvers of playboating on Class IV and V rapids. It generally takes place on high-gradient, low-volume waterways, i.e. creeks, but there’s no hard and fast line in the sand.

You’ll find creekers limbering up on Lochsa River snowmelt in spring, and winding down the season on the damreleased North Fork of the Payette River near Boise come fall—both of which are bigger water than can be properly considered creeks. And if “creek” implies a range, “steep” is a matter of degree as well. It could mean an elevation loss in excess of 100 feet per mile, or it could refer to what Bitterroot-born kayaker Tyler Bradt does, which is huck himself over drops like Washington state’s 189foot Palouse Falls.

Some of the best athletes in North American creeking come from the neighborhoods of Asheville and Hood River, Oregon, and Canada’s Ottowa Valley. What those places have that others don’t is year-round creeking water.

Dedicated creekers with the means

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tend to spend their winters paddling creeks in Chile. Locals who can’t get away wait for Bear and Kootenai to come in, or for Big Timber Creek in the Crazy Mountains near Bozeman, or Lolo Creek across the Idaho line, or the Golden Canyon section of the South Fork of the Clearwater. (Todd and Matt have mentioned scouting a promising creek in Glacier National Park.) There aren’t a lot of un-run lines anymore, and finding a new one is hard work.

Creekers tend to know their spots, and those spots were the last place I figured I’d find a chance to converse with one of them.

It’s difficult to talk to people when they’re flying down mountainsides.

So I tracked down Cheyenne Aura Rogers at Missoula’s Kettlehouse Brewery. Cheyenne, as many Missoula beer drinkers may know, is the kayaker featured on the brewery’s 16-ounce cans of Eddy Out. She is also one of a very few women among the dozen or so Missoulians who comprise the city’s few steep creek crews.

Cheyenne is almost inhumanly patient with the intolerably repetitive question that scaredy-cat landlubbers inevitably ask people who strap their lower halves into blunt plastic shells and toss themselves down mountains: Why? The answer, of course, is because it’s insanely challenging and rewarding and fun. All of which sounds eminently reasonable to the landlubber, leading, on further examination, to the question behind the question: How does one overcome the sheer fear?

This is not, the landlubber insists, a stupid question. The Fear is real, no less for the accomplished creeker than for the awestruck landlubber. Todd had acknowledged it on our scout of Bear Creek, having just the week before

mess you up, or it could break your boat if you hit them wrong—or you come down and you keep trying to stroke just enough to clip the side of the hole. It was a high flow year, and I felt at that point in time that I wanted to be a part of the scene and be a part of this race, and I thought I was ready.

The feature...sometimes you almost have a dwarf perspective before you’re actually there, and then you’re like oh my God, this is huge.

I ended up clipping the side of the hole and it brought me back into it.”

The swim was caught on video and it’s up on YouTube (search for Pine Creek Boater Cross; that’s Cheyenne in the yellow boat at the 2:33 mark). The hole battered her for 10 seconds that looked like an eternity. She didn’t panic, and you can see her on the footage bracing purposefully, putting her skills to the test before finally new creekers is popping her skirt and swimming out of it. almost as as She’s watched that video plenty. Moments after her swim, worldand scouting wood. class kayaker Eric Jackson got sucked don’t let friends . into the same hole. He dunked himself with an intentional winCheyenne: “I think if you don’t have dow shade move—a snappy, highthe experience and you take a bad swim, powered roll—and set himself up to rudder out of the maelstrom. you might think, ‘this isn’t for me.’ But “I learned so much watching that,” if you’ve done it and you’ve accomCheyenne says. “He had the experience plished that same thing that you swam to be aware and confident of where he out of, you feel more like you need retriwas in that hole. That’s how you get out bution, or like, I got this! You have the of that. If you have enough mind conexperience to carry you through, to sciousness. And strength. It was amazknow that you’re capable of this, and ing to see that. Because up to that point, know your mistake.”

She should know. Cheyenne took her everyone else who was getting out of own bad swim in the FIBArk kayak race that was getting lucky and flushing at on the Pine Creek section of Colorado’s the right point in time. And he actually threw skills down to get out. And it was Arkansas River in 2007. like, wow.”

“I was on my time trial, and there’s A landlubber watching steep creekers this ginormous hole right in the middle sees little but big balls, but mere balls, in of the run, and you’ve got to either do a little sneak line—but there’s these pin creeking, are a one-way ticket to The rocks that you could hit and they could Fear. Skills trump balls. blacked out in a recirculating eddy and gotten himself entrapped in wood.

“I definitely said some prayers,” he told me.

“Anybody who says they’re never scared,” Matt had added, “is lying.”

The cure for The Fear, as extreme athletes prove to popular amazement time and again, is preparation and, paradoxically, caution.

Cultivating

Friends

important

snowpack

creek solo

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The point is that creeking, despite its superficial appearance as the most ridiculous sort of risk-taking, is actually one of the more carefully deliberate endeavors in all of paddling. First you learn to roll a kayak in flat water. Then you accustom yourself to the moderate rapids of, say, the Blackfoot.

When you’re ready (sound judgment required here), you start running Alberton Gorge, progressing from justdon’t-swim survival paddling to a purposeful downstream dance from feature to feature. You meet new people, you challenge each other and yourself. Maybe you see a YouTube video of kayakers making Big Timber Creek look easy, or you get invited to watch a race on Bear Creek. Maybe you think: I could do that...

“The progression of what it takes and the commitment to get to that spot Lather. Rinse. Repeat. is a really beautiful thing,” Cheyenne says. “You can effort necessary to run it: just a few hunkind of refine your skills in a way that dred yards, less than a minute from start brings you a certain level of balance, to finish. From a well-chosen rock near muscle tone, muscle memory, so that the end, you can see the whole course, when you step up and want to run minus a sharp turn at the top. You will something challenging, you’ve been be looking up. Eight kayakers show up training and working your way up to for the race, including Todd and Matt being ready to do that.” and Cheyenne. Each of the eight takes two laps on the creek, with the times combined and recorded on Matt’s laptop. uly 23, a full month after Best of the A safety boater waits in an eddy at the Bitterroot’s originally scheduled start, take-out, and radio relays with throw the creeks are dropping and the race is ropes are positioned on outcrops along on. Todd and Matt are unpacking gear in the course. The laps alternate between the Kootenai Creek trailhead parking lot spots of stony shade and blazes of white when two rock climbers pull up and spray. On shore, boater Ryan Witkowski start unloading their own equipment. has a rock fall on his finger and loses a One of them takes in the expanding profusion and says, “You’re gonna kayak nail, leading to a short delay. Cheyenne breaks her $400 paddle on a rock and this shit?” still manages to execute a dicey roll with “You guys are gnar-dawgs,” his partthe single-bladed remains. ner says admiringly.

Todd isn’t so lucky. He misses a Matt says, “You guys are climbers? must-make brace and then flubs a roll— You are!” happens to the best of them—and ends “Naw, man,” says the first climber. up swimming. I see him upstream, mid“We’ve got rope.” stream, toppling face first over a drop, I note, not for the first time, the kayak behind him, paddle in hand, Goreflexive self-deprecation common to Pro camera mounted to his red helmet, people who do extraordinarily difficult eyes big but composed. His crew fishes things very well. him out up a steep rock wall. He’ll Kootenai Creek is a short run, almost regroup and complete a second run, absurdly so in light of the coordinated

J

Montana Headwall Page 34 Spring 2012

coming in at 8th place with a DNF (did not finish) time of 1 minute and 11 seconds.

In the parking lot later, friends and family and awestruck landlubbers outnumber creekers by at least three to one, and I introduce myself to Matt’s mother. I ask if she worries. She tells me that she and Matt’s dad have had to acknowledge the dangers. They have friends who have lost sons to kayaking, but they’ve decided it’s unwise to squelch their son’s passion.

“Besides,” she says, “it keeps them out of the bars.”

Behind her, a kayaker named Zachariah Campbell reaches into a cooler in Todd’s van for a cold PBR. Todd, taking his swimmer’s medicine, drinks it from a neoprene booty.

The next day, on Bear Creek, the water is falling quickly toward too-low.

Seven paddlers take on the longer run, about a mile, with a two-mile hike to the put-in. The Bear Creek run is arguably tougher, too, with features named Tijuana Crack Whore (an elbow-munching boat-wide crevasse), Hotel California (you can never leave...) and Brave Bear.

Bear Creek is a one-lap, one-time race.

Todd bounces back to take Bear with a time of 2 minutes and 19 seconds—7 seconds ahead of second-place finisher Matt. Along the way he wins the Brave Bear award for navigating a long stone slide half-submerged and going over the run’s main falls backwards. His trophy is a bronze-plated—well, spray-painted, probably—neoprene bootie.

Bear is too long to take in from one vantage, and halfway through the race I exit my black-fly-ridden rock ledge and walk downstream to find another place to watch. Passing me, a woman walks uphill with her young son and two young daughters in tow. As they pass me, the littlest girl, in a pink dress, tugs at her mom’s hand.

“Mom, can I do the kayak race?”

Mom, having misheard, says, “That’s where we’re going!”

Two beats later, having realized what was asked, Mom clarifies: “Well, now, honey, we can’t do the kayak race.”

Not yet, anyway.

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Montana Headwall Page 35 Spring 2012

by Caroline Kurtz

WILD THINGS

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T

hey’re one of the earliest signs of life in your yard each year—those brilliant, spotted VW “bugs” of the insect world. I mean ladybugs, of course, though we in this country are about the only people who call them that.

Elsewhere—amid scores of colloquial names—they generally are known as “ladybirds” or “lady beetles,” which is more accurate, since they are, in fact, beetles and not true bugs.

Ladybugs likely are the first insect that your children get to know. Their charming looks and industriousness at eating plant pests like aphids and scale bugs have made them a favorite of farmers and gardeners throughout time.

But one of the coolest things about ladybugs is something you only see high up in the mountains. At times and places known only to other ladybugs, they appear together by the hundreds and even thousands in late spring through fall, covering rocks, trees, even picnickers.

Entomologist J. Gordon Edwards—author of one of the best-loved climbing guides to Glacier National Park—described one such “living scourge of ladybugs” at 7,000 feet on Pinnacle Peak in Washington in 1952.

“They swarmed over my body and face,” he wrote in The Coleopterists Bulletin. “They violated my lunch, and they tried to crawl into the lens of my camera... For months thereafter I found squashed ladybug remnants in odd places in my equipment.”

A few weeks later, Edwards again encountered thousands of the tiny peak baggers, this time under limestone slabs atop 9,365-foot Allen Mountain in Glacier National Park. These did not annoy him, he wrote, because they were all dead, likely due to the unusually heavy snows of the previous fall that, instead of insulating them, entombed them.

Edwards climbed mountains in Glacier once or twice a week for the next four summers, but he never saw more than a few ladybugs until July 9, 1956,

when he found hundreds once again.

More than 50 years later, the mystery of these congregations remains. Are the insects mating? Sometimes. Are they looking for a place to spend the winter?

Probably. But why they swarm above timberline and how they choose a site is still unknown.

It’s the unpredictability of coming across such a scene that gives you that special lift, that sudden delight and sense of weirdness—like finding your ho-hum neighbor is really a secret raver.

Ask hikers about it and you’ll hear plenty of tales about ladybug encounters, everywhere from the Sleeping Woman Trail to the Swan Range. Google “ladybug swarms” and you’ll find YouTube videos and blog posts from all over the West: trees or bare ground blanketed in red; hikers hopscotching to avoid crushing dozens with each step; the bitter taste and perfume as flying hordes find open mouths.

Around here, the flash mobs might include imported Asian ladybirds, which vary in color but can be distinguished by a marking on the pronotum, or neck, that looks like an “M.” You’ll also run into native types like the aptly named Hippodamia convergens, with classic black on red coloring. Don’t bother counting the spots, though: They don’t reveal age.

Just like some human partiers I know.

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Montana Headwall Page 37 Spring 2012

by Ari LeVaux

GRUB

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Years ago I showed up at my first Bear Buffet vaguely hoping to see lots of naked hungry people who’d neglected to doublecheck the spelling of “bear.” Alas, the goal is not to partake in the buff. Rather, the feast—on May 4 this year in Missoula—gives humans a chance to eat what bruins do when they wake up from their winter-long hibernation.

At first glance it might look like cuisine for a convention of wilderness survivalists: nettles, dandelion roots, glacier lilies and other spring forage. This, you might think, is food you’d only eat if you’d awakened ravenous from a long sleep and there was nothing else to fill your stomach. Which is exactly the point.

Hosted by the Great Bear Foundation, the event begins with a pre-dinner “bear walk” in the woods near Greenough Park, led by renowned bear biologist and GBF co-founder Chuck Jonkel. He’ll point out claw marks on trees or other bear signs he might find, and he’ll note the foods that black bears eat.

Fiddlehead ferns, angelica, cow parsnip stalks—even shriveled kinnikinnik berries, dried on the plant from last fall, are fair game. Not all of the calories sit still and wait to be plucked. “If it’s warm enough, there might be thatching ants to sample,” says Shannon Donahue, GBF’s outreach coordinator. “They taste like zesty Italian dressing, and you have to eat them quickly before they bite your tongue.”

It takes weeks of prowling the backcountry for GBF volunteers to gather raw ingredients for the meal. Some items are served unadulterated to help people identify them in the wild and experience them the way bears do. Others are cooked into more human-friendly incarnations, like a glacier lily salad with huckleberry dressing, nettle soup, wild mushrooms or a stir-fry.

Grilled salmon, elk, or other wild game will also be on the table, a nod to a bear’s omnivorous status. And expect something like apple crisp for dessert, in honor of the bruin sweet tooth.

The exact menu remains TBA until volunteers come back from their foraging expeditions. In recent years spring has arrived late, which makes edibles hard to find. “Last year we were worried we were going to have to feed people garbage and birdseed!”

Donahue says. “But that allows us to teach people about the challenges the bears are facing at that time of year, and the importance of bear awareness.” When there’s nothing in the wild, bears come to town to raid trash cans and fruit trees.

So if the reverse were true—if humans scrounged for bear food when we got hungry—what would we eat?

Personally, I’d head for the glacier lilies. The roots (corms, technically, or swollen starchy sections of root) remind me of extra-juicy coconut flesh, while the upper parts have a

radish-like spice. It’s impressive that half-asleep bears can even find the corms. The roots lurk as deep as 18 inches down, and only grizzlies have large enough back muscles and claws to dig that far into rocky alpine soil.

It’s a good thing they’re such a pain for humans to dig, too.

Otherwise, gluttons like me might grab them for food on backpack trips, leaving bears without their sweet breakfast.

And that’s when they’ll come after yours.

The 13th annual Bear Buffet (suggested donation: $20) will be held in Missoula’s Greenough Park as part of the GBF’s “Bear Honoring” celebration. Go to greatbear.org or call 829-9378.

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by Chris Dombrowski

HEAD TRIP

When are we gonna be there?

Why didn’t you pee 10 minutes ago while we were at the gas station?

Why do we suffer so much if we’re merely going to turn to dust?

These are the eons-old unanswerable mysteries, though some clues can be gleaned after periods of deep meditation or while sharing Doritos with one’s sixyear-old son on a road trip in early June.

I had lit out with Luca (five hours after his last day of kindergarten) in search not of epiphanies but of clear water to fish on our first father-and-son camping trip.

Given the weeks of rain, merely hitting the road seemed a great accomplishment. Montana’s rivers, charged by the melting of the densest snowpack in decades, had been rising to flood-stage at a torrid pace, and one plan (salmon flies on the Firehole) after another (soft hackles on the Beaverhead) had gone the way of driftwood during runoff.

Watching the USGS Hydrograph chart for the Upper Missouri and Columbia River Basins was like monitoring the Dow Jones in the fall of 2008—one disappointment after another.

Not that I was a Wall Street type, as anyone could tell by our food supply.

Our travel menu consisted of some nonorganic hotdogs, fixings for s’mores, and a bag of Doritos that we opened as we crossed County Line on Highway 200.

To our right the Blackfoot looked thoroughly menacing as it hurtled nauseatingly under Blacktail Mountain, completely covering the car-sized boulders from which tourists like to cast their flies mid-summer. It made me think of Brad Pitt, standing in for Paul MacLean in the famous fly fishing movie, filmed on a river that was standing in for the Blackfoot, which we’d soon be standing in.

I took one hand off the wheel and reached back toward Luca.

“How about a handful of those, Bud?”

Montana Headwall Page 40 Spring 2012

Joe Irons

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Joe Irons

He didn’t stop munching but rooted around the bag and placed some chips in my hand, one and a half chips, to be precise.

“You have the entire bag and you give me one and a half chips?” I asked, worried briefly about his future political leanings.

More bag rustling, more munching sounds from his orange-stained lips.

“Where are we going again, Dad?” “We’re headed over to the Missouri to fish with an old friend of mine.”

“I thought you said the water was too high and muddy.”

“It is, everywhere else in the state, but Jason’s got a secret stretch for us. He’s gonna motor us to a cool camping spot, then come pick us up the next day.”

“If I ever get a ranch I’m going to name it Tyrano Raptor Ranch.”

What ranches named after species of dinosaurs had to do with high water, I hadn’t the faintest, but on the way to Rogers Pass, our conversation continued to jackleg like this, Luca’s exhaustioninduced non sequiturs energizing me with their hilarity.

“Are there going to be grizzly bears where we’re camping, Dad?” “No grizzlies, but there’ll probably be some mountain lions nearby.”

“I saw an elephant’s penis at the circus.

It was, like, as big as my leg.”

We passed the “Entering Prime Beef Country” sign just west of 434 with Luca’s

slap-happiness at its peak and he soon slipped off into sleep, his head resting on the window.

I looked back and forth between my son and two antelope literally roaming the dusk-lit prairie between the Front Range and the Big Belts and thought: This is what I always wanted before I knew I wanted it.

Lewis witnessed “a large herd of bighorned animals on the immencely high and nearly perpendicular cliff opposite to us,” as he wrote in his journal. “On the face of this cliff they raked about and bounded from rock to rock with apparent unconcern where it appeared to me no quadruped could have stood, and from which had they made one false step they would have precipated 500 feet.”

Roughly 200 years later the site is home to the Lodge at Eagle Rock, a luxury fly fishing outfit managed by my friend with the camping spot: veteran guide Jason Newmack.

I was of something Formerly a catcher on his college baseball team, Newmack he at : sports the type of brick-shithouse body one would want to slide “I’m everything .” around, not collide with. He stood over me as I unpacked the car and folded up the rain fly.

“Listen, Dombrowski,” he said, before I could introduce him to Luca, who poked Knowing that there are innumerable his head out of the tent briefly before uncelebrated locations where Lewis and returning to his coloring book. “This spot Clark shat their drawers, I find it difficult to I’m taking you to is one of the last secrets, so if you write a kiss-and-tell piece, I’m get excited about celebratory “Lewis-andClark-Camped-Here” spots. Luca, however, gonna slash your tires.”

Newmack and I cut our teeth guiding was thrilled to learn, upon waking on together 15 summers ago, and I’d quickly Saturday morning, that the Corps of learned that the only thing bigger than Discovering What Others Had Discovered Newmack’s mouth is his heart. He planned Centuries Earlier had camped just as we to fish with us for a while before dropping had, on the west shore of the Missouri near Eagle Rock. It was here, at the mouth of us at a killer campsite for the night, then what’s now known as Cooper Creek, that pick us up the following morning.

reminded told me age three finding I see

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Joe Irons

“Hey, Luca,” Newmack said. He kneeled down to peel back the tent window and shake my son’s hand. “I’m Jason. You ready to go catch some trout?”

“Big ones?” Luca asked.

“Well, that depends what you call big.”

Nymph fishing with an indicator is nobody’s favorite fly rodding technique, but relenting to the effectiveness of dredging is sometimes necessary if the young angler is going to remain attentive.

As we motored up the Missouri Newmack handed me a stiff 5weight rod rigged with two sowbug imitations, some split shot, and a red balloon for an indicator.

Clearly the admiral of his boat, Newmack doesn’t leave much up for discussion. “I know it’s not ideal,” he said, just after cutting the motor, “but with this bright sun the fish won’t be chasing streamers. Toss this into the bubble seam there and hand it to the boy. Once he catches a couple, we’ll teach him how to cast this awful rig without tangling it.”

I lobbed a wide-looped cast into the run and passed the rod to Luca, who leaned against the swivel seat between my legs.

“Jason,” Luca said, “why do we have a balloon on our line?”

“It’s a bobber, just like the one you use while perch fishing; it keeps the flies from sinking too deep, and tells us when a fish hits.”

“My dad has a friend who’s a clown who can tie balloons into anything, even aliens.”

Before Newmack could respond, the red balloon quivered and shot upstream.

“Luca, set!” we yelled simultaneously, and though Luca was a second or two late on the strike, the line pulled taut and rocketed to Montana Headwall Page 42 Spring 2012

the surface powered by a 3-pound rainbow. The fish broke water, shook its head and, before long, turned and beelined it for the boat.

“Reel up the slack, Luca,” Newmack said. “Reel to beat hell!”

“Aww,” Luca said, cranking on the reel, “you said a bad word!”

Newmack hooted.

“It’s not the last one you’ll hear!” I’ll tell you what, though.

If you land this fish, I’ll give you a quarter for every bad word I say. Deal?”

“Deal,” Luca said, straining against the fish and the bent rod.

Soon I slipped the net under the colorful buck and we all three admired it.

“Look at the spots on him,” Newmack said. “He looks like a friggin’ leopard!”

“You said another bad word,” Luca said.

“Geez,” Newmack said as he slipped the fish back into the river.

“I can’t believe I’m paying for ‘friggin.’”

The Mighty Mo, meanwhile, was cranking at about 13,000 cubic feet per second, about 4,000 cubic feet per second more than its 50year average for early June, which is to say: If you threw a stick in the river and gave it a two-second head start, then ran your fastest along the bank to catch up to it, you would more than likely fail.

Needless to add I kept a tight hold on Luca’s life-jacket vest strap whenever he leaned over the gunnel to look at the flotsam (which he called “fish farts”) or made an over-enthusiastic cast.

Newmack quickly taught Luca what he called “the water-haul,” a technique that allowed him to cast the cumbersome nymph rig by using the water to put tension on the line and “load” the rod.

“It’s really a flop, not a cast,” Newmack said. “Just pretend the rod is a windshield wiper going back and forth: back, stop, forth, stop.”

Within a couple of hours, for the most part thanks to Newmack’s impeccable knowledge about trout-holding water, Luca had caught more fish than I’d hoped he would catch in a weekend—too many to count. But then again, as my uncle once asserted, the object is to lose count.

Did Luca know how good he had it, stockpiling 18- to 22-inch rainbows while most anglers in the state were lamenting the lattecolored bodies of water hurtling through their valleys? No, he did not. Was he tickled, attentive, thrilled in an uncorrupted way? Yes, he was, in a way that left me envious.

“See you in the morning,” Newmack yelled as he motored away from our campsite. He left us tucked against the rimrock underneath several ponderosas, serviceable umbrellas shrouding us from the light rain.

After I pitched the tent I watched Luca scout around. The canyon wall across the river was lit by a setting sun busting through storm clouds. Most of the sedimentary lines in the red rock ran horizontally, except for one football-field sized patch that had, millenniums ago, been subject to uplift, and looked to the metaphoricallyinclined observer like time turned on its side.

Pelicans swooped by, a Swainson’s thrush banked its song off the basalt—I was surrounded by “the wonder of nature.” But I turned my attention to study the nature of wonder: my son, immersed in his surroundings.

He clambered across the rocks, through the wild raspberry and barely-flowering Solomon’s seal, oblivious to my observation, picking up stones, placing them back, shaking branches and letting the water fall on his head. He was still fishing, just without a rod and reel, and I was reminded of something he told me at age three while exploring on a morel hunt: “I’m finding everything I see.”

“Hey,” he said, snapping me out of my reverie: “Look at this owl pellet. I think it has teeth in it.”

Sure enough, the bottom tooth that had once belonged to a small rodent protruded from the grayish pellet, along with two

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Joe Irons

small bones that someone from another age might have carved into whistles.

“It makes me hungry,” he said. “For s’mores.”

With fingers still covered in tacky scorched marshmallows that had been smashed between graham crackers and chocolate the night before, I unzipped the tent and glanced out, sans eyeglasses, at two blurry aspens backed by a blushing sky. My own Monet, I thought.

I lay there looking out at the river musing about whether I was spoiling Luca by letting him catch more 20-inch trout in a weekend than I had caught in my entire first five years of fly fishing.

Having taught myself to fish, I wondered what, exactly, I wanted to teach my own son about my passion.

Not much, really, I concluded, except that fishing was a wonderful ritual, by turns mindful and mindless: nothing the water itself, over time, won’t teach.

Soon I heard the growl of Newmack’s boat motoring upriver, and it was time to break camp. There would be an hour or so of shadow in the canyon, and Newmack had mentioned that pitching streamers, particularly crayfish imitations, might fool one of the Missouri’s

whopper Brown trout, like the 12-pound denizen one of the Lodge’s clients had landed in 2010.

Half an hour later, not two strips into the retrieve of my first cast, the line lurched tight. Luca raised his arms in joy as a big rainbow, 4 pounds on my mental deli scale, exploded through the river’s surface.

The lanky post-spawn hen came quickly to net. I released her without much fanfare, with as much respect for the creature as I could muster at 7:30 in the morning, and headed with Luca down shore for the takeout and the trip home.

Always take a different road out than the one you took in, my grandpa used to say. Why not? After finishing off a little road fuel, a fabulous filet cooked by chef Geoffrey at The Lodge at Eagle Rock, we made our way home over Flesher Pass, where the high mountain streams were beginning to clear, albeit slightly.

Newmack had generously offered us a hot shower and a room for the night, but Luca was anxious to get home and do some more camping.

Joe Irons An introspective father, a writer, can know failure at every turn, every sentence, but you know you haven’t flubbed your first father-and-son camping trip when you pull into the garage and your son asks if you can pitch the tent in the backyard.

Montana Headwall Page 43 Spring 2012

Wet and Wild The Bigfork Whitewater Festival celebrates liquid love

by Yogesh Simpson

HEAD TRIP

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Yogesh Simpson

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I

Karl Crittenden’s rapid transit

t’s Saturday morning at the public park in Bigfork and I’m hoping to catch some of the nervous energy among the paddlers signing up for the 37th Bigfork Whitewater Festival. My boater friends in Bozeman have impressed upon me the epic scale of this spring’s runoff.

A heavy drizzle drums the taut nylon tents and the candy-colored plastic kayaks littering every patch of grass. I figure the “Wild Mile” must be at a menacing level.

I find Mike Dezzani, one of the event organizers, and he tells me the river is flowing at 4,800 cubic feet per second— not unprecedented, but a daunting flow, he assures me.

“This has been a tough spring for some people because the water spiked up fast,” says Dezzani. “Normally you get some warm-up time, but this year people had to jump right in and go.”

The Wild Mile is the last stretch

Yogesh Simpson

of the Swan River before it empties into Flathead Lake. Around the turn of the century, logging companies blasted house-sized boulders out of the channel to make it easier to float logs downstream. The resulting jagged riverbed created the perfect jumble of rocks to form nearly continuous Class V rapids at high flows.

National Park. Surely he’s feeling some anticipatory jitters. I stick my voice recorder in his face.

“Should be a fun time, should be interesting to see what happens,” he says.

Not quite what I’m hoping for. I press him further for some juicy details about the potentially bonemangling holes he’ll be dodging to spare his young life.

“It’s just a giant wave train right down the middle…hey, I gotta go say hi to these girls,” he says, turning to give hugs to some wet-haired 20-nothings prancing across the parking lot in dry tops and spray skirts like neoprene fairies.

Predictable confidence for a 19-year-old, I guess. A downriver race is part of the events tomorrow, but there’s more to just running the rapids. Today is the Yogesh Simpson slalom, which I’ve heard is the hardest part.

Nate Wilcoxen is a 37-year-old Near the registration tent I find a tall, curly-haired competitor with his stonemason from Bigfork. He’s been race bib in hand. Onno Wieringa is a paddling the Wild Mile for almost 20 19-year-old rafting guide in Glacier years, won the festival in 2003, and

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has built the slalom course in years past. The course consists of 15 plastic gates suspended from lines running across the river, forcing competitors to make precise moves in big, chaotic whitewater.

“Imagine being a kid and all the baddest paddlers show up and take you on your first run of Kootenai Falls,” says Wilcoxen. “All the sudden you’re riding around with the pros and you can’t help but pick up some of those skills. Brad Ludden really experienced the world with those people.”

The kayaking celebrities brought fame (and notoriety) to the festival and to the party scene that surrounded it. “It became known as the Woodstock of kayaking and that soured it for the town of Bigfork,” says Wilcoxen. “It was chaos.”

Things seem to have settled down since those heady days, and the festival has returned to its local and family-oriented roots. This is the first year registration hasn’t been held in a bar.

That’s all well and good, but I’m determined to find a shred of the event’s former rowdy spirit.

Back near the registration table I spy a couple of potential competitors in raincoats drinking coffee from paper cups under a pop-up shelter. I ask them if there will be any carnage in the boater cross event.

The boater cross, as you might Yogesh Simpson guess, involves heats of multiple kayakers running the same line simultaneously. “It’s usually all friends, “Anybody from anywhere has a nobody’s agro, it’s pretty low key,” says hard time running that slalom course,” Corey Leadbetter. Again, not the red says Wilcoxen. “It’s stout.” meat I’m looking for. “I’m the guy you’ll In fact this course and this festival were a proving ground for some of the best kayakers in the world. During the first half of the ’90s (until other venues replaced it), the Bigfork Whitewater Festival was a stop on the pro circuit, one of 10 events in the country where slalom and freestyle competitors could earn points to qualify for the world championships.

Big names like Steve Fisher, Dean Cummings, and Dan Gavere came to Bigfork to show their mettle and, in the process, inspired a new generation of young boaters around the Flathead like Johnny Meyers and Brad Ludden. Meyers, who finished sixth in the World Kayak Freestyle Championships in 2009, grew up in Bigfork and learned to paddle during those days. Brad Ludden grew up in Kalispell and has gone on to establish himself as one of the best freestyle Laith Jones fights the flow in the slalom kayakers in the world.

see hanging out in the eddy waiting for the pack to get in front,” he adds. “I’m not looking to throw elbows and get pushed into a hole.”

Elbows and pushing? Now we’re getting somewhere.

It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m standing on the big rock at Big Drop, the best vantage point for spectators who want to witness the heart of the mile.

A steady stream of tourists and locals meander up the trail that runs along the north side of the river.

Many of the onlookers are tourists who came to Bigfork for the quaint lakeside B&Bs, downtown shops and galleries. For them the festival is a novel sideshow. Others are paddlers who came to run the Wild Mile and party their faces off, but didn’t bother to register for the festival.

Last night I’d hitched myself to a cadre of kayakers from Missoula on that program. The Garden Bar in Bigfork was the epicenter of the debauchery, but the party didn’t stop there. After last call the Missoula crew eased into an all-night dance party in an Airstream trailer parked by the river.

Today there’s still action, but on a slightly healthier scale. On the big rock the sun breaks through the heavy clouds for the first time all weekend, prompting at least one of the 50 or so spectators gathered on the rock to go

Yogesh Simpson

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Yogesh Simpson

shirtless. The atmosphere is definitely casual. There are 12-packs of PBR being passed around; a girl in a tutu and pink giraffe-print hoody with ears makes out with her boyfriend.

As a spectator it’s hard to know what’s going on at any given time, but it doesn’t detract from the spectacle. All day kayakers sporadically appear unannounced from somewhere upstream and rocket past the crowd.

The boater cross is definitely the most exciting to watch. It’s a blur of paddles, boats and helmets in a frantic skirmish with the frothing water. The paddlers hit the overhead wave at the bottom of the Big Drop in rapid succession. The ones who don’t emerge upright pile on each other in the wash behind.

I’m still standing on the big rock when 20-year-old Bigfork native Dave Meyers arrives fresh from his heat of the boater cross, still in his paddling gear. He’s proudly sporting a shiner that all but seals shut his left eye.

I ask him what happened and he shrugs off the massive purple contusion saying it must have been someone else’s boat or paddle that got him when he flipped over in a rapid.

An hour or so later I find out that Meyers’ eye socket was in fact tenderized the night before when he mouthed off to the wrong guy at the bar. Turns out he’s also the younger brother of the legendary Johnny Meyers. And it all comes together for me: the family fun, the hometown tradition, the rowdiness, all coalesced in a black eye.

Back in the park, hung-over paddlers take down tents and strap boats to trucks. I find one of the festival organizers, Shawn AltenYogesh Simpson burg, and ask him how it went. He says he’s satisfied that the businesses and boaters got along for the most part. And, yes, the festival will carry on next year.

“Nobody got arrested,” he explains. “So both communities should be happy.”

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www.mtheadwall.com

HEAD OUT

APRIL April 7 Sink or skim at Whitefish Mountain Resort’s 7th Annual Pond Skim, where costumed competitors cross an 80-foot pond on skis or snowboard. The top prize: $1,000. Get thee to skiwhitefish.com, before it slips your mind.

Spin to win at the Rocky Mountain Roubaix in Frenchtown, where cyclists can expect myriad obstacles besides that wintertime belly, including potholes, rocks and broken asphalt. Distances range from 31 to 61 miles. Break away to montanacycling.net.

April 14 There’s no trouble a’ bruin at the Grizzly Peak Adventure Race, but the skiing, cycling, and running could get hairy. The contest starts at Red Lodge Mountain Resort and ends at

Sam’s Tap Room in the scenic town. It’s all downhill once you sign up at montanacyclingracingseries.com.

April 21 Break out of hibernation at Missoula’s 24th Annual Grizzly Triathlon, which boasts a 1,000-yard pool swim, 20K cycling course and 5K trail run. Try it at grizzlytri.com.

Keep your bearings at the GrizzlyMan Adventure Race and Black Bear Challenge in Greenough, at the Lubrecht Experimental Forest and the Resort at Paws Up. Both events call for orienteering, trail running and mountain biking; the 12-hour adventure race adds whitewater paddling and more. Roar your approval at grizzlymanrace.com.

April 22 Bust out of winter at the Ice Breaker Road Race in Great

Falls, a 5-mile road race, 3-mile run and 1-mile run/walk that’s certain to be long on wind and big skies. Runner’s World voted it one of the top 100 races in the country. Plow forth at icebreakergf.com.

April 27 Load up the blunderbuss and slap on the moccasins for a weekend of shooting, tomahawk chucking or knife throwing when the David Thompson Black Powder Shoot & Rendezvous unloads in Eureka. Aim for info at welcome2eureka.com or call 882-4691.

MAY May 12 Escape the confines of the world and tiptoe through the prickly pear during the Don’t Fence Me In Trail Run in Helena’s South Hills. The event is a benefit for open lands and consists of 30K, 12K and 5K runs, with a 5K dog run, too. It’s wide open at pricklypearlt.org.

Chad Harder

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Discovery Ski Area. The event is part of the Montana Off-Road Series (MORS). Get cranking to montanacycling.net.

Hitch up your britches during the Great Falls Bike Club’s Belt Creek Omnium, featuring a $500 cash purse for topnotched pedalers in a time trial and road race. Get belted at greatfallsbicycleclub.org or call 761-7021.

June 23 A plague will be on both your houses if you miss RATPOD, or Ride Around The Pioneers In One Day. The one-day, 130-mile bicycle trek—a benefit for Camp Mak-A-Dream—begins in Dillon and winds through the Big Hole Valley. Join the rat race at ratpod.org.

May 13 Make the muscle fibers in your thighs unravel during the Unravel the Scratch Gravel mountain bike race, in the Scratchgravel Hills outside of Helena. Work it out at ilearntolive.com/events.

Get a leg up on the competition during the 24 Hours of Rapelje, Montana’s only 24-hour mountain bike race, held in Rapelje, north of Columbus. Spend the day at 24hoursofrapelje.com.

May 18 Practice your lines at the Fort Benton Spring Classic Fishing Derby, a weekend-long event with cash prizes for the heaviest fish and harvest. Snag a spot at fortbenton.com/derby.

May 19 Saddle up and ride, Sally, at the Tour of the Swan River Valley, a two-day tootle through the Potomac and Swan Valleys, with 85-mile and 110-mile routes. Join the peloton at missoulabike.org.

Get hooked at the Koocanusa Resort & Marina’s Salmon & Trout Derby, a two-day challenge to catch the big ones in Lake Koocanusa. Reel in the details at koocanusaresort.com.

May 26 Revel without a pause at the Bigfork Whitewater Festival, a weekend-long event that features kayak racing on the “wild mile” of the Swan River. Float your boat to 837-5888 or bigfork.org.

Join the high plains drifters at the 3rd Annual Vigilante Mile and 5K, in Helena: You can run in both races for one fee. Take registration in your own hands at vigilanterunning.org.

Chad Harder

JUNE June 2 Have a blast at the Powder River Buffalo Shoot near Broadus, where shooters use single-shot and leveraction rifles to fire on targets up to 1,000 yards away. Set your sights on 436-2585 or broadusfire@rangeweb.net.

June 9 You’re gonna want to dip more than your toe in water after Run Wild Missoula’s Pengally Double & Single Dip, featuring a half-marathon with a 2,700-foot elevation gain or a single-dip 10K. The panting begins at the University of Montana’s Riverbowl Fields. Step up to runwildmissoula.org.

June 17 Make tracks during the Discovery XC mountain bike race, a single-track and double-track smackdown on the steeps of the

There’s only one hill to conquer at Wulfman’s Continental Divide Trail 14K. It’s at 6,300-plus feet in elevation and it’s part of the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail between Homestake Pass and Pipestone Pass. Get high at buttespissandmoanrunners.com.

Your head will spin from the views and your legs will spin for a week during Adventure Cycling’s seven-day Cycle Montana Road Bicycle Tour between Missoula and Bozeman, with stops in Ennis, Dillon, Wise River, Butte and Three Forks. Roll over to adventurecycling.org or call 721-1776.

Bare your fangs at the 55th Annual Beartooth Run. The race takes place in the scenic Beartooth Mountains, with an 8.4-mile full course and 4.2-mile appetizer. Grab a bite at beartoothrun.com.

June 30 Mile-high meadows await those who take part in the Lolo Pass Mountain to Meadow Half Marathon and 5K. The event begins at the Lolo Pass Visitor’s Center and passes through Packer Meadows, a historic Nez Perce travel route. Join the higherups at runlolopass.org.

Montana Headwall Page 49 Spring 2012

by Jack Ballard

HEAD GEAR

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Lisa Densmore

The trouble began in the late 1990s. Kevin Toohill was living and working in Red Lodge. An expert in geography with a graduate degree from the University of Wyoming, Toohill was especially proficient at managing GIS data. In a nutshell, GIS (Geographic Information System) technology allows people to visualize and analyze geographic information. Toohill’s work involved extensive manipulation and analysis of maps.

Like most Montanans, Toohill’s friends included a robust percentage of pesky hunters. Once they discovered he could combine regions of several maps on his computer—and print one that showed the exact area they wanted to visit—he was bombarded with entreaties for his services. What backcountry traveler wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to forsake cutting and pasting sections of different topos together or lugging multiple maps around, only to use small sections of each?

But Toohill’s trouble with beggarly acquaintances was only temporary. In 1999 he decided to channel the endeavors into a business, and launched MyTopo (www.mytopo.com). To start, he set to digitizing all 56,000 USGS quad maps of the United States that could be cropped and digitally stitched together to create custom maps, work that continues to this day.

In 2000, marketing whiz Paige Darden came on board and reached out to local and regional outdoor writers. She connected with Bill McRae, a hunting and optics expert from Choteau.

McRae referred her to John Zent, editor of American Hunter magazine. Zent ran an article featuring MyTopo, reaching 1.3 million readers in the process.

“They listed my home phone as the contact information in that article. I had hunters calling night and day requesting maps. That article put MyTopo on the map,” Darden quips.

MyTopo’s first products—waterproof topographical maps ($10 to $160)—are still a cornerstone of the business, used by hunters, hikers, anglers, search-and-rescue personnel, and a wide range of other professionals and backcountry travelers.

Toohill and Darden spent hundreds of hours testing paper and ink for durability. “The basic test went like this: After printing maps, we’d submerge them in Rock Creek and leave them for a week to see what held up.”

The unorthodox testing technique and finished results served the business well. Major outdoor retailers and organizations— Cabela’s, Remington, Realtree and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation—began funneling customers to MyTopo via their websites. The company built on the success with increasingly sophisticated products.

“At first all we had were black and white maps with aerial photography, most of it shot in the early 1990s,” Darden says. But in 2003, partially in response to 9/11, the government instituted a program of aerial photography over the entire country, updated every year or so. The GIS data immediately gave MyTopo the capability of printing highly detailed aerial maps, in color, of a couple acres or thousands.

Today, farmers and ranchers buy the aerial images to display their property. Land managers find the maps helpful for tracking forest succession, the process of forest growth and decline

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that’s sometimes accelerated by phenomena such as forest fires or logging. Hunters use them to identify clearings, logging activity, burns, and other features that might indicate game or travel routes. An additional company product—a topo map with an overlay of aerial photography—makes it possible to anticipate feeding and bedding areas for elk 500 miles away.

You can also buy the maps blown up to the size you want, as I have, and gaze at them at home for stress relief ($80 for a 4-foot by 5-foot). Compared to a therapist, they’re a bargain.

In 2004, MyTopo merged with the company that created MapCard, an online mapping subscription service. MapCard software lets you export maps to a GPS unit, add information you want (from area outlines to property boundaries) and order or print maps from home.

At least one hunter enamored of the software wasn’t looking to bag an elk—the goal was bagging MyTopo. In 2011, Trimble Co., an early and highly successful competitor in the GPS field, purchased MyTopo for an undisclosed sum. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company kept Toohill at the helm.

MyTopo’s core product line now includes Terrain Navigator (the $99 consumer version) and Terrain Navigator Pro ($299 and

up), an industry standard for search-and-rescue agencies, the U.S. Border Patrol, tribal land managers, federal and state wildlife departments, and engineering and oil companies.

The software enables the import and export of the data files that agencies use for projects like tracking elk migration or documenting the travel patterns of radio-collared mountain lions.

For wilderness explorers, myself included, the Terrain Navigator software and MyTopo maps—whether printed by MyTopo, inked at home, transferred to GPS or solely studied on the computer screen—are incredibly powerful tools. Hunters can upload waypoints of deer rubs marked in the field to pinpoint areas of buck activity. Fishermen can store the waypoints of productive holes on a stream, then print them on a map to share with attractive anglers of the opposite sex, a lure far more creative and effective than a hackneyed pickup line.

I use Terrain Navigator Pro to scout out new hunting territory or plan for off-trail scrambles to wilderness lakes: I trace the intended route, then analyze the elevation profile and terrain to see if it’s feasible. Although I’m a computer user with a near-embarrassing level of incompetence, I’ve found the software generally intuitive and easy to use.

In fact, it’s hard to find a downside to a MyTopo product, aside from perhaps the humiliation factor. Use these tools, and there’s no excuse for getting lost. But at least it’ll be easier to get found.

Jack Ballard

MyTopo’s Kevin Toohill

MyTopo headquarters in Billings

Hunters, anglers and hikers all have to be aware of property boundaries so they don’t trespass on private land. Not many years ago, this involved reading maps with land ownership indicated in various colors, or by sticking to the interior of immense parcels of public land such as national forests, where boundary issues are less complicated.

Thankfully, a Missoula company eliminates the guesswork. Montana Mapping & GPS (www.huntinggpsmaps.com) offers a full line of custom GPS maps for Garmin GPS units: Public and private land boundaries simply pop up on the GPS display.

A couple of things make this software especially appealing. First, the color-coding for various types of land ownership is

exactly the same as what you’d find on maps sold by government agencies, except you can get it electronically instead of carrying paper. Second, an upgrade lets you see not only the private land boundaries, but also the names of the people who own private parcels.

Last fall I used a couple of Garmin GPS units with this software while hunting. For the Garmin “Nuvi” model in my Tahoe, using HuntingGPSMaps was as simple as inserting a micro-SD memory card and powering up the unit.

I used a pair of Garmin Rinos in the field, with similarly impressive results. In Wyoming, my hunting partner dropped a big mule deer buck on a slender strip of public land intersecting a highway. West of Red Lodge, I killed a tender young

whitetail on a small block of state land jutting into a private holding from the national forest. In neither case would I have been comfortable making the stalk without the map on a GPS clearly showing I was on public land.

Law enforcement personnel like the software perhaps as much as hunters.

Mike Moore, a warden captain for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks in eastern Montana, told me “we’re seeing less trespassing situations than we did five years ago. The new GPS software is pretty darn good and there are more and more hunters using it.”

The innovative software (starting at $40) isn’t only handy for hunters: It also helps keep anglers and floaters from drifting into private property. It’s simple to install, easy to use, and keeps you on the right side of the line. That’s a good place to be.

Jack Ballard

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CLASBY CONTINUED FROM PAGE 21 “He’s just blossomed,” says Shelley Thomas, Cash’s longtime nursing assistant. Cash not only goes on the MATOR trips—these day’s he’s helping Clasby organize them. “To see the transformation is miraculous,” Thomas says. “There ain’t nothing like the outdoors.”

Cash says he keeps a picture of his big rainbow hanging above a living room window, and looking at it helps get him through to next year’s trip. For the experiences—for the “open door”—he thanks Chris Clasby. “The guy’s unbelievable.”

U

nbelievable is perhaps the operative word for Clasby’s life, although it’s an outsider’s description of him, something he’d never use himself. The word he does use is “lucky.”

He won’t hear it otherwise, even when you visit his home. He’ll take you on a guided tour, navigating from room to room to explain the picture of the pike or the antelope, or the photo of him and Watne, an undulating expanse of golden prairie in the background. Furniture in his house is pushed against the walls; the floors are clear to make way for his wheelchair. On an end table, on the kitchen counter, in a cup next to the computer, are his mouth sticks.

Someone who doesn’t know Clasby will almost immediately read despair into the scene. It’s impossible not to think about the things he has lost. But that’s not how Clasby wants to think. He wants to think about adventure. And the biggest adventure is still ahead, he says.

In the fall of 2010, Clasby got a call from the Five Valleys Chapter of Safari Club International (SCI), a hunting advocacy group that also sponsors trips for people with disabilities. The SCI needed an adaptive rifle mount for Mikey Wilke, a 14-year-old with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The degenerative muscle disease often proves fatal by age 25 and, in

two disabled hunters for their unique “never quit” attitude. The “Pathfinder Award” includes a hunting safari in Africa, the caller told him. Clasby was going on a trip. In the summer of 2012, he and Watne will take an all-expensespaid vacation in Namibia for a 10-day hunt. Of the 10 species he’ll be allowed to take (from an impala to a wildebeest), he is most excited about the warthog. “They’re the most dangerous.”

The Namibia trip, not surprisingly, was one of the many things he mentioned during the summer float on the Clark Fork. The fishing had been slow. It’d been hot and sunny for days and there were no bugs, no rises, no reasons to think it would get better.

But Clasby was still smiling and telling stories. He talked about his first bull elk, about an upcoming antelope hunt in Wyoming, and about Africa. He also talked about the people in his life. People like Watne, who is the official videographer on their hunting trips. And like his friend Dan Picchietti, who “dedicates basically his whole hunting season to me,” Clasby said. The support has reaffirmed in him the belief that people are basically good. “They help me out with the little stuff,” he explained before falling silent for a moment.

Michael Schweizer “And I guess the little stuff is really the big stuff.”

Wilke’s case, it had left him unable to And then there is the man Clasby walk since he was 8. The group was first met walking across a grocery store sending Wilke on a guided elk hunt near parking lot. Hank Emerson extended a Darby. hand at the very time, and in the very Clasby provided the mount for way, that Clasby needed it. “Hank realWilke’s electric wheelchair. The boy aimed the rifle by moving a joystick with ized more than I did what it means to restore someone’s morale, to let them be his chin. He shot a 6-point bull from 90 who they are essentially, to help them do yards by sucking on a plastic tube. what’s really them,” he said. It’s a lesson Months later, Clasby got another call from SCI. Every year, the club recognizes Clasby is intent on passing along.

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The Crux CONTINUED FROM PAGE 58 this point-blank range). But I’m concerned that when the bear looks up— as it inevitably must—its instinctive fear-response will cause it to bolt right at me, forced to attack before it has time to think.

The faintest thought, a gauze of a thought—drifting, like fog, or passing slowly over my mind, like the gradual rotation of the light filtering through the canopy, falling upon some flowers and not others, warming some soil but not other soil—announces itself to me: This could be how you die; in a few seconds you may be charged by this bear, and killed and eaten. It seems unlikely, but the set-up is certainly right for it.

Strangely, I’m not frightened.

Concerned, or deeply perplexed, yes, but to be faced—imminently—with the possibility of so intimate an experience as one’s death, my detachment is puzzling. The matter doesn’t feel insignificant, nor do I think I’m in denial— there’s a big-ass bear a few feet away who’s about to get a rude surprise—but still, there’s something like an ancient

understanding of the agreement, the contract, that got us all here.

If life is about something more than the mechanical beating of the heart and the metered pulses of one’s lungs—and I think it is—then might death, too, be about something more than the mere cessation of these things?

The bear grazes on, as content as an old man working in his garden. He’s in

habitat that grizzlies should be occupying, doing the things grizzlies would do, but they are gone, I think again—and this, too, registers dimly as a kind of mistake, a glitch in the natural history of the world.

How strange for the pastoral to coexist within me right next to alarm. The scene is so beautiful that, despite the danger, I want to take a picture.

He spies my movement as I reach for my camera. He jumps a little, as if receiving a small shock, and bristles for a moment, then turns quickly around and hurries away a short distance before slowing to a more dignified walk as he does the math: Hey, wait a minute, I outweigh this guy two-to-one, why am I running?

He slows further, but continues up the trail, into the shadows; and after giving him the dignity of increased space and the personal boundaries I’ve disrupted, I start up the trail too, eager to get on with the day, and all that lies ahead of me.

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Bearing gifts

A

by Rick Bass

THE CRUX

When a bruin looks deadly, it’s a surprise ending

with the morning’s down-current The only thing reassuring about the summer walk in the Selway, in breeze trickling away from him; and scene (other than the fact that the bear country where I’ve never been, with his head down in the lilies, he has not yet lifted his head to behold crossing a creek barefooted, to didn’t see me. me) is that he’s eating flowers. It’s a keep my boots dry.

He’s just being a bear, in one of the pretty scene, like something from a It’s strange to think about my sweat few unguarded moments, perhaps, in children’s illustrated Bible—the lion being whisked by the shuddering and the lamb lying down together. current and becoming shared in his life. It’s likely no one’s been on this How can something so at peace infinitesimal fashion with all among the lilies be capable of— the other chemistries that surge down through the old much less interested in—killing forest, through the gills and and eating you? the brains of the salmon There are no grizzlies in the How can so at waiting below.

Selway: so say the scientists.

The forest is dense, the old There are grizzlies within sight among the lilies be capable of the Selway; grizzlies in the growth soft gold light sprinRattlesnake outside of Missoula, kling down on the rushing litof and and in the Ninemile Valley, 30 tle creek, and on the newmiles away—a day’s walk for a green leaves of everything, bear—but, as if some imaginary and on the just-emerged dotted line exists, the animals bright flower blossoms: paintaren’t found here. (Actually the brush, bellflower, lupine, arniline is not so imaginary; Interstate 90 ca. The creek is wild, and the trail is trail all year—not since last hunting is the barrier. A few years ago, one right beside it, so that it’s loud; I’m hik- season—and the eight months of vacaing strong and a little fast, I suppose, tion must have been good for him. grizzly did try to cross, but was struck though I’m not aware of how fast I’m I’m simultaneously trying to identiby a truck). going until I’m forced to come to a fy him—there’s a big muscular hump Two seconds, three seconds, maybe quick stop because of the big chocolate- between his shoulders, and it’s the dark four. I take a few steps back and into color that big male grizzlies sometimes the flowers myself. I’m slightly downcolored bear nosing around in the glaget—while the sober recognition of my hill of the bear—I’ve decided it is a cier lilies at the trail’s edge, back in the foolishness, my taken-for-granted-ness, black bear, because I can’t see its claws shade, just on the other side of a col(a grizzly this big—300 pounds, or umn of that beautiful sunlight. stretches the moment into that strange more?—would have daggers visible at He’s less than 30 feet away, and he quality where the walls of time seem didn’t hear me and didn’t smell me, to fall away.

Continued on page 56

something

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eating you?

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